Audiotube

Audiotube is a cloud-based digital music distribution platform that hosts, manages, distributes, promotes, and monetises artists’ songs. This unique, disruptive digital product receives and also pays out royalties to artists.

The start

In order to validate Audiotube’s proposition, we first built an MVP which was integrated with 4 music distribution channels. Over a 12 month the product was beta tested among 120 musicians and labels. A lot of positive feedback was received and it proved that there was an appetite for Audiotube in the market. We then created a strong feature backlog to be released into the full commercial offering over the course of the next year.

What happened next?

The full commercial offering was released in 2017. This phase involved a new skin for the brand, new user experience for the website, re-architecture of the platform, and introduction of continuous delivery and DevOps into the release process.

The rebrand

Audiotube had matured into an eco-system of transparency in the music industry. We felt that this was the right time to inject some freshness into the brand, while also bringing in the eco-system factor into the branding while also retaining its core value proposition.

And so it began. Our brand design team brainstormed and created a hand-drawn music note to serve as the brand mark. This music note was also sketched to look like the burning flame of a candle which brought light into an industry filled with darkness.

That was not enough

We added a black, organically shaped circular base to represent the darkness in the industry, and suddenly the brand mark began to make even more sense. We then added an outer yellow circle to represent the DSPs who are part of the Audiotube eco-system. The colour of this circle is the same warm hue of the brand mark to represent enlightened DSPs. This outer circle embraces the darkness and slowly moves towards the centre hoping that over a period there would be no darkness.

Now listen, I am not a man to swear, but I have to say: HOLY SHIT! You guys are insanely good. All I know is I have some serious good karma to have met you all. I am floored!

Scott De Mercado

FOUNDER

The tech

As Audiotube was transitioning from an MVP to a commercial platform, it was important to keep performance and scale as the most important criteria on the tech stack front. The platform was rearchitected to have loosely coupled DSP integration modules with uniform features but unique connectors to allow the developers to integrate DSPs in the future at half the current cost and extremely rapid pace. We then linked the platform with top tier global Digital Music Service Providers – Apple Music, Amazon Prime, Spotify, Google Play, YouTube, SoundCloud, Tidal, Pandora, KKBOX, VEVO, Saavn, and SimfyAfrica.

The stack

Audiotube was built with a HTML5, CSS3 front end and Python for the web services and server side code. The database used was mySQL and the entire application was hosted on Google Cloud infrastructure. We also integrated FastSpring to help Audiotube to manage subscription payments, billing and management. Currencycloud’s payment gateway was also integrated to enable the Audiotube team to make royalty payments to artists and labels. Jenkins was used for continuous integration and delivery.